Wondering what all the fuss is about? Here are some blogs that show off the best the microblogging site has to offer

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s announcement Monday that her company had bought Tumblr was coupled with a promise to the microblogging service’s users: “We promise not to screw it up.”

So what’s so precious about Tumblr that needs to be protected from its new corporate masters?

The microblogging service can be used for writing, coding and a whole host of other, serious pursuits, but it works best as a collection of the strange and wonderful things people do. There are also plenty of cats and animated GIfs to keep you entertained.

This daily grab bag of bizarre, nerdy and adorable news items is one of the best ways to stay on top of weird Internet trends. Whether it’s cat GIFs and viral videos you crave or tech news and Photoshop wizardry, The Daily What has you covered. This is what memes are made of.

This is a bit of log-rolling on our part, but our colleagues at the National Post really know what they’re doing when it comes to Tumblr. Updated several times a day, the blog is a showcase of the best photos and infographics running in the paper, uploaded in glorious high-resolution format. (Graphics editor Richard Johnson’s work is especially awesome.) All the images link back to articles on the main National Post site for more context.

Is this hilarious or abusive? After Greg Pembroke started documenting his son Charlie’s many crying fits online, the Internet was split between parents who sympathized with the father and those who vilified him as a bully. Although it’s clear Pembroke loves his son, Charlie does seem to cry at the strangest things, such as “We asked him to stop hitting his brother with a plastic wand” and “The slide wasn’t slippery enough.”

Since the original burst of interest, Pembroke has turned Reasons My Son is Crying into a reader-submitted blog where parents can send pictures of their own crying children along with hilarious explanations of what set them off.

Despite pixels supplanting film, the New York Times’ vast photo library — known as the “photo morgue” for some reason — is getting a second life on Tumblr. The blog is updated several times a week with some of the paper’s incredible archival photos from the past. Best of all, the original notes on the back of the photos are also included. This is a must-follow.

Our favourite colourful search engine often knows more about us than we do, but occasionally Google’s suggestions are quite beautiful (or disturbing). Google Poetics gathers some of the best examples and updates several times a week.

If you want to despair at the state of public education, this Tumblr will give you plenty to worry about. In what must surely be a cathartic exercise, teachers submit some of their students’ most hilarious and cringe-worthy writing samples to this blog so we can all see what they see on a daily basis.

The best ones are usually gross misreadings of history. An example: “Jesus spread his beliefs throughout the Holy Land in what came to be known as the Holocaust.”

The Hermit Kingdom frequently releases photos of the Great Successor to the international media, usually as a way to bolster his image as a leader of the people. But more often than not, it’s just Kim Jong Un inspecting troops, factories and anything else his advisors put before him. He usually has a look of mild curiosity and puzzlement, which makes the whole thing even funnier.

The success of Garfield despite any obvious hints of “humour” has long been a puzzle, but this blog finally manages to inject some wit into the comic strip. Garfield Minus Garfield jettisons the lame lasagne jokes in favour of depressing monologues by sad sack Jon Arbuckle, who appears to descend ever deeper into madness with each comic. This one is darkly hilarious.

One common Tumblr trope is weird Photoshopping, in this case removing the teeth of prominent entertainers. There’s no real reason why it works, but it’s surprising how often you’ll find yourself going through pages of these strange photos. Like the best of Tumblr, it’s both creepy and amusing at the same time.

Whereas normal New Yorker cartoon captions are pithy and thought-provoking, the “shitty” versions this man continually submits (and gets rejected) have no such pretensions. Often they are nonsensical or inappropriate, but always funny.

To many people, Tumblr is primarily an image-sharing website, and if there’s one thing the Tumblr community can get behind it’s a visually appealing theme with frequent updates. Things Organized Neatly culls images from across the web of people obsessively arranging and organizing their belongings. Following this Tumblr ought to break up some of the more subversive entries above.